Anamorphosis Smarty Pants!

Apr 21, 2011

Gutsy enough to send corrections to a dictionary or encyclopedia?

What do you think of people who do? Are they just “smarty pants”? Well, meet Smarty Pants Me!

Decades ago I sent a note to Webster’s New World Dictionary about their strangely illustrated abacus. As a young girl – I believe I was about two at the time (wink) – I was delighted that Editor David Guralnik responded so favorably and agreed to correct the image for a future revision of the dictionary.

Yesterday, I had the temerity to tweak Wikipedia’s rather stale article on Anamorphosis – a subject terribly dear to my heart, as you know. A date and provenance had been wrong, an important definition had been omitted, and a current practitioner had been overlooked. Point being that books – dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibles, whatever – are written (and can be rewritten) by human beings just like you and me.

So if your own “teacher genes” and/or iconoclast nature impel you to correct “scholarly” resources, we’re in this together! Smarty Pants! And proud of it!